the traces of human left on the internet.

The digital interfaces we interact with are just that: interfaces to hide the beneath. Interacting with modern technology is unlike any other experience in our physical life, because you typically see the infrastructure of what exists around us.

Houses have walls, visible HVAC lines, so on and so forth. They are visibly supported by something to anyone who looks.

How do you know a bridge works? If it attaches one road to the next and looks like it touches the ground, you’re set to go. You know the infrastructure and holding patterns of our every day lives.

Yet, the bones of our technology are not visible. Especially to the untrained eye. The internet exists by the capabilities of … smart people? Wires? Packets? The terrible and otherwise infuriating existence of ISPs?

There’s an isolation that comes with interaction through interface: it is a very one sided transaction, especially in more corporate and polished websites.

The website sees into you, but not vice versa. You don’t know the contents of the databases, details of the CI/CD infrastructure that scans and tests and deploys builds.

You don’t know what’s looking at you.

The human friendly (albeit not perfectly designed) websites of the 2000s and the 90’s betrayed the inner workings of our internet passages. Today’s websites are a team of developers, legal, and beyond in a trench coat for optimized corporate goals. The websites of the previous internet were scrappy, weird, very punctuated by human errors and human decisions.

Yet, the threads of our lives (and the very humanity we don’t see embedded) gets translated digitally over the years.

We always see data given to products as a bad thing, and not without reason. But, the concept of data as a part of a greater system is a nice and cozying concept. The idea that somewhere deep in my messages, comforting words from my friends will exist. Photos of my favorite moments and spots will always be with me. There is traces of love, fear, and loss throughout every social media platform.

Everything digital that’s given to humans becomes human to us through our embedded lives in it. Twitter, TikTok, and beyond take on the content they serve. They’re a culmination of the community, culture, and tech underneath.

Platforms are living: alive and shaped by humans and change in their own ways.

We are surrounded by digital mirrors, on a macro and micro scale. Your entire life could probably be figured out by someone if they had access to all of your internet accounts.

We are documented, in data centers we don’t own, on phones not ours, in bytes that contain things we wrote. Our experiences and interactions have been broken into fragments, existing beyond us and creating the basis of content and culture on the platforms we haunt.

Everything digital is reflecting humans in its’ own way, if not on the surface. What does our internet say about us?